Adding another one to Norwegian:"Snut er ut"Snut meaning "snout", referring to the snout of a pig. "ut" meaning out, "er" meaning is. "purk" or "purken" is also a common way to refer to cops. a "purke" is a female pig.

Pinyin is good at first, but later when you start speaking and listening faster, people say words and you have to just know the tones to deduce what theyre saying. Ive been studying chinese for about 9 months now and i had help from several native speakers, including one of my best friends and two girlfriends between the time i started and now. Im going to china for the first time this summer, but i like to consider myself at least a little experienced because i go to a school with a lot of FOBs. All of my teachers have also been pretty much FOBs who go to china regularly. The best way i can tell you to start is to buy a textbook and study on your own and i mean FUCKING STUDY. I needed to learn all of chinese 1 (普通话) in about 2 1/2 weeks in order to transfer on time to chinese 2, and i was waking up at 8, studying at 9 am, and continuing until 2ish with one meal in between and one 15 minute break to socialize. Tones are hard to grasp at first, but practicing speaking everything you learn will make it instinctual. You dont think about the yones after awhile they jusy come to you. Good luck🤙.

So it's me, the person who made this post >>12878Just want to kinda redact what I said somewhat.

>There is very little room for error on tone, and people will not use context to deduce your intended meaning.>This is exactly what I've heard. It's spelled similar in pinyin but the Chinese won't work out what you mean if the tone is off.

That was what I heard, but actually people can understand you if you get the tones off, obviously they are important but it's not as severe as I or that poster made out.

In terms for people saying Pinyin is bullshit, by all means go straight into characters and start learning them right away, but to put it simply you're going to NEED Pinyin in the beginning. All of the dictionaries use it and you're just making a monumental task even more difficult if you try and learn chinese without it.

And for what it's worth, chinese childrens books usually contain the pinyin below the characters, so it is something that is known here.

Putting it out there that pimsleur is great too, if you want to torrent those.

Native spanish speaker here... that's atrocious and the first time I've read caribbean spanish (dropping every consonant possible, mixing genders and code switching whenever). I wish we could call caribbean spanish a dialect, that way I can disregard everything my brain is currently cataloguing as a near illiterate level mistake.

btw it's barely intelligible, half the time I struggle to understand wtf they're saying. it's easier to understand argentinians and nearby cultures because even though they deviate quite a lot from standard spanish their variety is actually pretty systematic and they write the way they speak always using standard spanish grammatical rules.

BUT going back to the subject immersion is usually a very good idea, for any language.

I'm looking for a synonym of 'get' which implies that the object or action is received unintentionally, or that it's undesired. Does such a verb exist in English? Yes, I checked the thesaurus, but I didn't find anything that satisfied me.

The closest word I can think of is 'take' as in, "The car really took a beating this winter." But it just doesn't usually work outside of idioms like 'take a beating/licking'.

isn't get the one that implies it's unintentional or undesired? take is the one that makes it seem intended and using it ironically implies the lack of intent. is there some word parallel like this in some other language that you're trying to match in english?

Good evening chums, i know this is not a music board, but my headache is not coursed by sound but by my lack of linguistic insight.

I want to know the lyrics to this song. because i wanna sing it. Google is not my friend in this situation. Can anyone here make out what Sublime is singing and perhaps write it down for me? in french or in english, anything goes.

>>12933Yeah, interlingual wordplay doesn't go so hot, I guess. I once made a joke about how the Mongols were able to conquer so much territory because they all had one goal, they were a mono-goal kind of people.

I believe the Roma I knew explained it as being his language's version of "George," but I thought "George" was an Anglicization of "Gregorios" from Greek.

So, what's a better semantic domain to use against the idea of Language Relativity than colors?

I'm thinking emotions would work. They're universal, but require thought to distinguish, unlike color recognition, which is instinctual. That said, I can't really think of any language that distinguishes emotions differently than English and Spanish, the only two languages I speak.

Pastoralists have many words for shades of color. The brown, white, yellow, grey, brown range can be absolutely huge. As you probably knew, most color systems don't distinguish blue from green. Black, white, red, yellow, green-blue, brown are the most stable. Grey is common. Pink is rare. Orange is basically unknown. There are a class of colors derived from plant and animal products eg. indigo, marron, lilac. These are always young and easy borrowed.

Emotional states may be universal but only the basic ones have specific roots. The usual rendition for higher emotional states is periphrasis with reference to "heart", "mind", "body", "eye". They don't say happy, they say "heart-pleased", they don't say snarky/irreverent, they say "hard-eyed", they don't say sad/depressed, they say "broken-hearted", they don't say brave but "heart-y". Furthermore, these expressions don't always translate to the same thing. "Heartlessness" means cruelty as in English but licentiousness in another language (and also conceivably cowardly).

This way of expressing feelings is productive in English when we don't use core emotions, verbal roots or borrowed words.

Semantic range of most expression is relative. The question is one o f degree. If there is no need for something to be distinguished, it doesn't get distinguished. Thus, lots of languages don't create words for digits greater than 5. 10, 20 and 100 numerals derive from roots meaning greatness or totality. This isn't merely limited to intangibles, distinguishing between lips-mouth, hand-arm, hand-leg is globally more absent than it is present.

I'm not sure why you feel motivated to challenge this. It's just more parsimonious to be relativistic.

>>12935I'm no linguist but I was wandering around on Wikipedia back then and I felt a vulnerability in this line of study. I'm just some layman, I can't really look into this concept properly, so I decided to consult this board and hopefully catch the attention of someone who could maybe make something of this idea, or at least put my mind at ease. Thank you for that, by the way.

I feel that perhaps the geopgraphic locations where languages develop, and the circumstances in which they develop, affect the way certain languages categorize objects, and that no situation is ideal for preparing a language to be perfectly comprehensive when describing classes of things such as plants and animals. Not everything lives everywhere, do people who live far away from anything venomous, like the Inuit, have words for poison?

Because of this like, natural gap in our knowledge, people applied the words they have to new concepts and we end up with shit like the family groups of Wittgenstein. I wonder how much scientific progress has been held back by our inability to properly handle things that don't quite fit in our categorizing, things like Echidnas and suicide trees/suicide plants.

I apologize, I'm in way over my head with these idle thoughts. But I can't really be satisfied with parsimony in science. I'm kinda hoping that I can loop someone sho knows what the fuck they are doing into pursuing these ideas further, just in case I'm onto something here and there's insight to be discovered down this road.

When texting, theres so much you can display with emojis. Being ironic, embarrassed about asking something, saying something jokingly, being unseriously siggestive while still indicating a level of seriousness. I rarely use punctuation when texting people. Emojis to me are what indicate inflection in the voice. I think the amount of punctuatiom we have is satisfactory, especially with emojis.